Sarah BennettIf you think your parties are legendary, try being a part of the record-breaking party that sat trackside at Santa Anita Park on Saturday, Feb. 22.
An estimated 565 people were on hand for what will soon be confirmed by Guinness World Records as the World's Largest Beer Tasting, an epic toast that is expected to oust the current record held by The Oast House in the UK, which hosted a 322-participant beer tasting in August 2013.
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565 simultaneously-drinking beer fans may not seem as impressive a number of people than, say, the 50,000 that attend and tasted beer at the Great American Beer Festival, but specific regulations must be followed in order for it to qualify as an official record-breaker.
Firstly, the tasting must be blind (meaning no one is allowed to know the beer they are drinking until afterward), there must also be multiple beers sampled, and every person must be drinking the same beer at the same time. This rules out most beer festivals where tasting is a free-for-all and everyone knows – depending on how many they've had before – what they're putting in their cup.
The beer that helped make history.; Credit: Sarah Bennett
With these rules in mind, the 80-year-old horse racetrack turned a regular season race day into World Record Breaker Day and partnered with Yelp to invite its Los Angeles East Elites and their guests to the private blind tasting.
Despite the racetrack's newly implemented craft beer program – which this month features Eagle Rock's Manifesto Wit and Revolution Pale on draft in the Club House bar – the three beers sampled during the record-breaking attempt turned out to be anticlimactic macros: Stella, Shock Top and Shock Top's cloyingly sweet chocolate wit.
Regardless of which beers were used for the making of history, those who stayed after the World's Largest Beer Tasting to watch the ponies race were given a sign of appreciation from the turf gods – a California-bred horse named Ambitious Brew beat out other favorites to win the contentious Sensational Star Stakes race.
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